Articles in the archive contain broken links because
outdated files are removed.

Friday, October 31, 1997

Boo!
Hope I didn't scare you. Happy Halloween. I'm getting ready to Jet off to The FRAG. I
believe the net connection to update from there is available, but you never know. Either
way, have a great weekend.

Gamer's Guide
I am very proud to announce that Blue's News is now the home of the Gamer's Guide (formerly the QNG). The guide, consisting of the Quake
Newbie Guide, created by Darren "Dakota" Tabor; QuakEncyclopedia, created by
Andrew "Kolinahr" Wu; and Who's Who in 3D, also created by Andrew
"Kolinahr" Wu represent the finest resource available to try and keep up with
the people places and jargon of this community. This does not represent a foray into the
muddy (and often bloody) waters of site hosting at this time, is is a singular event
representing the addition of a site integral to what Blue's News tries to accomplish. I'd
like to thank Dakota and Kolinahr for their hard work in preparing for this move, and
welcome them aboard.

Future versus Fantasy 3.9
Future versus Fantasy 3.9, called the Monsters Test (perfect for Halloween) is out
on the FvF Page along with screenshots and full
descriptions of what's new. The new release uses 100% custom models and sounds, and seven
new monsters completely replacing the original Quake monsters.

New Open GL Driver For PowerVR
Vik Long sent along the newest Open GL drivers
(82 KB) to use with the Quake II demo on PowerVR cards (such as the Matrox m3D and
VideoLogic Apocalypse 3Dx). Here's the scoop:

For the proper operation of the GL driver, you
MUST start the game with q2test.exe +gl_monolightmap 0f (that's "zero f") for
color lighting; Or, if you prefer mono lighting effects, start the game with q2test.exe
+gl_monolightmap 1f (that's "one f")

Cyberathletes Announce CPL
The Cyberathletes have announced the formation of a new league, the CPL. Here's an except
from the press release:

The Cyberathlete(tm) Organization, the first
professional computer gamers
organization in the world, announced today the formation of a new gamers
league called the Cyberathletic Professional League or CPL(tm). The CPL
will introduce a new Cyberathletic ranking system and will oversee all
Cyberathletic tournaments and events. The first CPL tournament will take
place in Dallas, Texas on March 6th, 1998 and will attract approximately
2,000 computer game players from all over the world. This tournament will
have total cash prizes of about $50,000, in addition to other prizes like
computers systems, computer peripherals and game software.

The CPL tournaments will be regulated by the
newly appointed CPL Board of Directors that will consist of the following industry
experts:

The Cyberathlete web site at
http://www.cyberathlete.com will be completely
revised to include a new CPL section and other new additions..

Ultimate QuakeRally Demo
There is a new variant on Quake Rally in the
works called Ultimate Quake Rally.
Ridah has released an AVI demo (1.1 MB)
showing off some of the features of the new version, described thusly:

Ultimate Rally contains an entirely new set of
classy sports, off-road and specialty vehicles, utilizing the advanced vehicle physics
engine used in Quake Rally. Each vehicle has been fine tuned to behave exactly as they do
in real life, to create the ultimate driving experience. Ultimate Rally also includes a
reworked control system, designed to please beginners and experienced QR fans alike.

10 Runes CTF
From the makers of Kill the Llama, comes 10
Runes CTF. As well as providing more runes, this mod allows each player to carry up to
two runes at once.

Clan Arena Fix
There is a file up on the Rocket Arena
page that server operators must download and install in order to implement the Clan
Arena variant of Rocket Arena.

etc.Couple of follow-ups: I referred to the
translation of Blue's News into an Asian Language on Legacy World the other day, and a few
people were nice enough to inform me that it is Japanese. Also, I mentioned that apparently
a Monster 3D will work in a Macintosh for GLQuake, and the answer is it definitely will,
as I heard from several people who do so (though it is pointed out that this does not
qualify as a "Macintosh sale" for those trying to support their faltering
platform) ... Log Parser of the Day is QLog:
there's a new version on the QLog page.
Thanks Prophet ...

Thursday, October 30, 1997

StormFront & QuakeCastTonight we have another edition of StormFront at 8:00 PM, followed by
QuakeCast at 8:30 PM, all times Eastern. As always, RealPlayer,
and probably an odd sense of humor required. Our guest on StormFront tonight is
artist Bryan Pritchard. On QuakeCast we have
Zoid, Shane Rudolph from D3mag.com, and Andrew
Sturgeon to talk about college for video game designers.

This VQuake release is a small upgrade.
Everything in whatever previous readme you have is probably still true. This release
simply adds one new setting.

r_surfacelookup (default 1, enabled)

Disabling r_surfacelookup will make the CPU
perform the 8 to 16 bit conversion step for texture maps instead of the Verite. On faster
CPUs this can increase performance. Results also depend on what resolution you choose. In
other words, your mileage may vary.

QuakeWorld on MPlayerMPlayer is now the first of the commercial online
services to offer QuakeWorld.

Vérité Performance Discussion
There is a lengthy, but quite interesting post by Stefan (maybe I should use a .plan file)
Podell on this message board called The VQuakeVHexen2 Engine
performance explained (I hope... ) that goes into detail on how Stefan, Walt Donovan,
and Michael Abrash managed to squeeze the kind of performance they did out of Vérité
accelerated Quake. The post also discusses why VQuake and VHexen II performance on the
Vérité 2200/2100 will not stand out versus performance on the V1000 until a native 2x00
version (in the works) is available. Thanks Weiman.

Likewise, Version 0.94 of the Thunder map editor has been released on the Thunder page.

Competitions
A few competitions, including a couple of those map contests (troubling because the prizes
are usually less than a company would pay a contractor for a map. On the other hand, most
map authors never make a dime, so...):

Screaming Neurons (Dan Bickell's new
outfit) is running a level design contest that offers a $500 (US) first prize. More
details are on the website.

Wizard Works is holding a contest to
celebrate the imminent commercial release of Q.E.D. by offering a $1000 (US) prize for the
best level designed with Q.E.D. (Though no prizes, apparently, for web graphics. I've
asked them to pull the Blue Q). Thanks John Callaham.

Lan Parties: An event added in Vevey,
Switzerland; another in Dickson, TN; something in the UK in the planning stages. I think I
forgot to update the live page yesterday, so if you were looking for the event in
Columbia, MD, it's there now (sorry for the confusion).

etc.
If you are having trouble reaching JediKnight.Net,
you can use the IP address (http://209.3.106.157/),
until your DNS catches up with their server switch ... Better late than never, Mike Thacker points out that he was the six millionth visitor (back in the good old days
when the counter here worked) ... Image of the day
is from last night's South Park. that's right, it's CrackWhore magazine (57 KB)! Thanks Bryan Stephens ...

Zoid on GL Bug and QW Cheats
Zoid made a lengthy .plan update describing a sprite bug in the new GLQuake that
he should have a fix for within a few days, and goes into detail about some of the
anti-cheating measures in the new QuakeWorld (and their shortcomings) and his feelings
about cheats in general. He also mentions he is almost done with GLQuake and Q2Test for
Linux.

Clan Arena
Clan Arena has been released on the Rocket
Arena page. This is a server-side patch (clients can use the standard Rocket Arena
client pak), that allows Rocket Arena support for three new modes: Normal, Competition,
and Round Robin, with variable number of players and teams - (2v2 or 1v1v1 or 3v3v3v3, or
any other variation).

SlaughteRama
SlaughteRama is a new mod that pits one against many in a simple, but interesting twist
(usually the best kind). More details, including the small client download and locations
of servers are on the SlaughteRama
page.

MacQuake on a Monster 3D?
According to Webintosh, Diamond is working on
drivers to allow general use of Diamond Monster 3D
cards in PCI based Macintoshes. Apparently, the Monster will work fine for the Mac version
of GLQuake already(?), and what needs to be worked out is support for everything else,
according to this quote from the Monster 3D FAQ
(thanks sCreeD):

"Quickdraw3D Rave and Glide drivers for
Voodoo Graphics on PCI-based PowerMACs are under development. Stay tuned for more
information on this."

etc.
Requiem sent along a Requiem clarification for
people (like myself) confused by whether Requiem 2.0, available on the Requiem page, is a client patch or not (the
site brags it is both a server-only patch, and also that it has new sounds and models).
The answer is you can connect with or without that pak on the client end and still play,
you just miss the sounds, models, etc, if you go without the pak ... MacUnreal
news: There is now a Mac Unreal page
up at the Org. Thanks Prophet
... Happy belated Birthday to ION Storm's
John Romero, who turned the big three-oh yesterday. Thanks Prophet ... Be afraid, Lone^Wolf
is at it again with his new humor site, Shree-D Buckshot, currently featuring an
"interview" with an official of the USMC ... I got a link yesterday that was so off-topic, but so worthy of sharing, that I did
something stupid that I've been considering for a while. If you are so inclined, you can
check out my "make believe .plan file"
(it's just an HTML page), where I'll put stuff like that ... Sound
of the Day is a reprise of Robin
William's Late Show appearance in .mp3 format, which makes it only 89KB. Thanks AIron/Phase^D ... This is the first
I've seen of this: thanks to BlackLight for
somehow digging up the link to an image that lead me to discover Legacy World, apparently a translation of
Blue's News into some Asian language, as demonstrated by this Image du Jour (89 KB) ...

QuakeWorld 2.1 (in several client
and server versions), GLQuake 0.96 and Regular Quake clients for Sun Solaris Sparc
Stations and X11 under Linux have been released tonight.

QuakeWorld 2.1 is mostly just a
maintenance release that addresses a few bugs that appeared in 2.0. It also has a full
installer for Windows 95/NT that 2.0 did not include.

GLQuake 0.96 features a new GL
miniport for 3DFX VooDoo chipsets that improves speed a bit. It also has a new user
friendly installer. The new Sun Solaris clients for Quake and QuakeWorld appear with the
cooperation of Sun Microsystems.

The new X11 versions of Quake and
Quakeworld for Linux offer a new avenue of play under the Linux operating system.

X-Men
TC Demo UpdateA demo (8.7 MB) of the commercial Quake TC: X-Men
Ravages of the Apocalypse, has been released on the Marvel Interactive page. Thanks _Nuclear_. Here are some other download locations
(thanks Rumble):

Brown Out
There's an article
on bootNET describing the impact of Quake II Demo downloads as causing an Internet
brown out. I saw that on Redwood's. The article
is actually a bit inaccurate in dramatically describing Blue's News and PlanetQuake as
being inaccessible for days after the demo's release. As you probably know, PlanetQuake
was in the midst of recovering from a hard disk failure at the time. As for this site, and
the odd error messages it has an annoying tendency to display at times, they are are
script errors. This is true even with the http: 1.0 "Server too Busy" messages
(making Redwood's supposition that using HTTP transfers as the root of the problem
innacurate as well): you'll notice when this occurs the server is not to busy to serve the
menu bar and pages other than the script generated news page. This is a problem we are
working on, and I figure this is as good a time as any to explain all this. Finally, on
this subject, the occasional errors like "ASP include file not found", and the
weird occasional request for passwords, are just caused by accessing the site while an
update is being loaded. Just another of the many ways NT can be a headache OS for a
webserver.

Competitions

More details are in on Impulse '97, a
large Quake competition, scheduled for December 6-7, 1997 in Melbourne, Australia. 1-on-1
deathmatch, free-for-all deathmatch, 4 player team deathmatch, axes only (hehe), and
TeamFortress (run by TeamFortress Software) competitions are all on the agenda. There is
room for 120 competitors with PCs, and some PCs are available for rent. There are over
$15,000 worth of prizes for tournaments and door prizes.

You guys have been good to me, and I sincerely
appreciate it. In the spirit of my immense gratitude, high regards, and great plans for
the future, I have some small tokens of appreciation to give back to at least a few of
you. These are the cool items I have left over from my visit to Activision last
month:

Eight Hexen II posters.
One Chronicle of Deeds book.
Four huge display boxes.
One small counter display stand.
I even have one huge Scourge of Armagon display box.

All of which I want to give away to you guys on
a first-respond, first-served basis, free of charge. Just be the first however many to email me with one paragraph telling me briefly
about yourself, how you came upon the Hexen cycle of games, perhaps what you'd like to see
in the future, and be sure to include your postal address. While they last I will send you
one of the prizes in the order I just listed them, ASAP. Better hurry though, because as
you can see, supplies are definitely limited, and that's all I have, folks. :-)

Movement
Jawed Karim's homepage, home to all his projects (like his jaw3d model viewer and jawFrag
LOG parser) has moved to http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~jawed/.
Please note this, as there is no forwarding info at the old location.

implemented input fields using Kevin's newer,
prettier box characters
- finished up multitexture support today
- got new drivers from NEC/PowerVR/Videologic that I still need to test, after I test them
I'll point interested parties to a URL where it can be downloaded
- started sifting through the bug database...joy
- worked with James Barnes solving some DirectInput issues. We now support the other 23
AUX buttons that DirectInput specs, cleaned out some cruft, and added support for a
vertical (up/down) axis that can be controlled by an input device.

Over the weekend Michael Gold from SGI was here
helping us bring Quake2 up on our shiny new R10K O2. We managed to get it up and running
TIMEDEMOs pretty reliably, but there is still a lot of tweaking that needs to be done. All
in all not bad for about 14 hours of work (Michael worked only worked on it on Saturday).

And through all this I've been fighting back
problems and the plague. I know, wah wah wah, quit yer whining....

More spooging over Paul Steed's cinematics can be found in both Bear's updates, part
one and part two.

Departments

Lan Parties: Added the Missouri
Massacre; and an event in Oakdale, CA. Also, anyone interested
in volunteering to help out at The FRAG, especially
if you plan on arriving in Dallas on Thursday, should contact Polish by emailing help@thefrag.com ASAP.

Help Wanted: As previously mentioned this
section is unweildy. I'm gonna fix this up today.

MailBag: Today's extra hefty MailBag has a couple
of reactions to the most recent Andrew Smith editorial.

etc.GameCenter Undergroundhas opened up, interestingly it looks like the first
effort for one of the big gaming sites to follow the gaming scene in a style that we are
familiar with around here. They're still working out the bugs (like the names with the
.plan files--Paul Cook?), and it should be interesting to see how the site develops.
Surprisingly, they are actually giving credit to other websites when they are the sources
of info (the major sites never do that). Interesting development ... Monster Mash: The fiend made #2
on GameCenter's
list of the 13 vilest gaming villians of all time (two on my list that didn't make
theirs are the Doom Archvile, and those acid spitting dogs from Diablo). Thanks Norton ... Thanks Ryan "BabelFish" Freebern of team terraFORMA for the Halloween
variant on |2|'s Blue's News logo ... Image
of the Day is one of those award dealies from The BlueBook (cool name), which is based in Brazil,
which makes their Blue's News
description come out like this: "Uma revista superincrementada sobre jogos, seus
autores, seus detalhes e upgrades. Entrevistas, um visual interessante e muitas novidades
que não se acha por aí, publicados por gente de peso. E esta semana, o Quake é o prato
cheio. Ótima para gamemaníacos." I see that the GameSpy
boys are also so honored (at least I think that translates to an honor) ...

Half-Life Preliminary Findings CD
Out?
Today is the day the free CD's with Half-Life demos and screenshots and stuff are supposed
to be appearing in Electronics Boutique stores. Thanks "Wiggly" Billy Wilson, Voodoo Extreme for the reminder. Here's the scoop
straight from Sierra's Half-Life
page:

> Preliminary Findings
Want to see demonstrations of the coolest Half-Life features by members of the Valve team?
Want to see the latest and greatest Half-Life screen shots? Then the Half-Life Preliminary
Findings CD is just what you need. Check in at participating Electronics Boutiques and
Best Buy locations Halloween Week (Oct 27-31) and ask for your FREE Half-Life Preview CD.
Limited to supplies on hand. If you miss getting your hands on one, keep your eyes peeled
here for portions of the demo available for download.

Quake II Playtest Report
There is an update on The Tech Zone that has
a first hand report of some playtesting of Quake II at id. I like this description of the
altered philosophy of the game:

"Instead of the usual kill them all and let
God sort them out, there was more "find really big and expensive things and break
them"."

Redwood was part of this
excursion as well, and we can probably expect an update from him about the experience.

Quake II Cinematics
Paul Steed and American McGee each updated their .plans talking about Paul's work on the
Quake II cinematics. Here's an except of what
Paul has to say:

...Kevin's idea to tell the story through a
series of news broadcast during the title intro was brilliant and Adrian's insistence that
we base our theme music on Conan rather than Star Trek is dead-on what id's about: kickin'
some ass....

...No words can express how cool the intro and
end game animation turned out. Each and everyone of you all will dig it. Short, to the
point and in your face, these animations tell a story while jogging along with you during
the game experience and in no way block your view or stop the flow.

As far as the rest of the game goes...I can only
say as I shake my head in disbelief looking over at Adrian's monitor: Wow. To say that the
multi-player experience will be taken to the next step just based on the textures done by
a single artist may sound bizarre, but trust me. The work Adrian's doing will have more
impact than any of you can imagine....

As you may have noticed id games have never
included cinematics. Our philosophy regarding this has been that if something didn't
directly add to game play it didn't need to be in the product. Sure, movies are nice to
watch, but we've never found a need to illustrate the plot of our games with anything more
than a few lines of text.

Then here comes Paul Steed with the grand idea
that id games should include cinematics. That we should give our audience something to
drool over the first time they play the game. There should be something to look forward to
when you finish the game. Crazy. But sure, go ahead Paul. Toss something together
and maybe it'll make it into the game.

Well, today we got to see what a guy like Paul
can do in his limited spare time with "antiquated" rendering packages and a lot
of hard work. From first to last frame this movie has the hairs on the back of your neck
raised. It's that fucking cool.

Quake II is going to be the best product id has
ever shipped. And now we have the best intro I've ever seen to start the whole thing up.

Editorial and Op-Ed
Also in Paul's .plan is a reaction to an editorial by Andrew Smith posted simultaneously on PlanetQuake and on Unreal.Org that expresses
Andrews contention: "...as a consumer, that I no longer have any right to make
demands on games companies, especially the ones with the largest number of fans....".

RGB3 RIP?It kind of goes against the whole low-key nature of the update, but a lot
of people are mailing me about it: there is an update on the newly-redesigned Ranger page detailing some philosophical changes
in the clan. Right up front in the clan's new approach: "Dont expect any
movies..." reveals that while RGB3, the most ambitious Quake movie of all time, may
yet be completed, but is no longer a Ranger project:

RGB3 is a subject of woe to us all. We lost a
member who was a large part of its production. He still promises to finish this project
but since we are not part of its completion we cannot consider it a Ranger
movie. This is not to say that we will never make a movie again - but at this time we are
not heading in that direction. We want to play and play we will.

CompetitionWild West Duel! is the home of
competitions for Quake players on the west coast. They are currently running 1-on-1 and
2-on-2 tournaments, with a 4-on-4 planned.

.plans

John "Hellrot" Cash made an
update noting New Zealand labour day (who knew?). BTW, on the subject of
"Aussie," I got two more responses from people who would find the term offensive
(heh, they were both from New Zealand).

Recent .plan updates by Scott
Miller and Brian Hook each attempt to use the other's words from the past to prove
their points.

Disruptor updated his .plan with some results of his attempts to get a handle on
the number of downloads of the demo at about a half-million downloads for the week (surely
a lot higher than that, since neither Stomped nor I
were able to supply figures).

Departments

Lan Parties: That date (and webpage) for the
UK's Fragstock have changed; and another Armageddon planned in Sacramento,
CA early next year,

Help Wanted: Help requested, help offered, you
know the drill: Today's spotlight on the non-commercial Apocalypse TC, headed up by
Steve Funkadooda, where they are looking for a map texture artist.

Carmack on Client Prediction &
Rhapsody
Two pieces of correspondence with John Carmack forwarded along shed light on a couple of
items of interest. The first is sure to please many who were disappointed with the news
that Quake II would not support client-side prediction out of the box. Thanks to chris for passing along this response from John
Carmack:

Well, after all of that, I have some good news
for you: I was working on the frame accurate movement for Q2 yesterday, and I found that
after all of the architectural changes that were made for Q2, client side prediction is
going to slide right in.

Its going to be in the shipping product. It was
only a question of when, and it turns out that it fits nicer than I thought it would.

The net game in the retail box is still going to
be fairly raw, but we should have the free expansion pak available on the net within a
month of shipping.

Thanks Jim McQuillan for passing
along the following response from John Carmack about the status of a Quake II Rhapsody
port:

I'm going to work on it after we master the win
version. A rhapsody executable may be available around the same time the win version hits
stores.

I wrote John about these, and he confirmed that he was working on client prediction
right now (fun Sunday afternoon!) though his response changes the time frame for when to
expect a Rhapsody port to well after Quake II hits the shelves:

I actually did some work day before yesterday on
getting stuff compiling for rhapsody.

Right after we hand off the master, we will all
be working on a free deathmatch expansion for Quake 2 that should take about a month. I'm
not sure if the rhapsody work will be done during that or after.

Jedi Super Weapons Patch
The first super weapons patch (7 KB) for Jedi
Knight has been released on The Valley of the Jedi.
Kinda the same progression as we saw with the first Quake patches: first the gore (in
Jedi's case, amuptations), then the jazzed up weapons. Thanks Prophet.

Jedi Knight .3Do Converter3DoConverter (126 KB), a new program that
supports ASC<->3Do conversion, has been released on DarkJedi.Com. To be useful you will
need to also find a program like WCVT2POV to convert more common file types like AutoCad
and 3D Studio formats to ASC (not to be confused with Altered States of Consciousness)
format, and you'll be set to create your own skins for Jedi Knight. Thanks to my buds over
at JediKnight.Net.

New Requiem (Really)
After a false Requiem sighting here this week, Beta
2A of Requiem Quake 2.0 (1.0 MB), AKA Requiem: Ode to the Dead, has been
released on the Requiem page. The new
version, like previous Requiems is a server-side patch (nothing is needed on the client
end to play), and features new weapons, new Teamplay and DM modes, new server and map
management options, better bots, new models and sounds (on a client patch?) and the
proverbial more. A QuakeWorld port of Requiem 2.0 is promised soon.

Quantum 3D, For the Record
Zanshin corrected my inaccuracy yesterday when I referred to the Obsidian SB100-4400 as a
3Dfx board, when in fact it is a Quantum3D board that diverges from the 3Dfx reference
design.

Competitions

The results of HexenWorld's name the snail
competition are in, the winner, in a pun worthy of the Blue's News seal of approval is Escargolon.

The results of the high ping bracket of the Queen's
of the Hill Tournament have been posted. Congrats to KillCreek and all the
contestants. Here's the top four: Queen of the Hill: KillCreek (55), 2nd Place Winner:
SeXkitten (39), 3rd Place Winner: Tikilite (15), 4th Place Winner: Ivy Girl (09).

etc.
There's an article on TechWeb
discussing the impact on the Quake web of some 350,000
downloads of the Quake II Test over a couple of days ... There is a
further explanation of higher pings in GameSpy
on QSBN (thanks Prophet) ... The Log
Parser of the Day is version 2.6 of WitStats, which fixes a couple of bugs and
adds support for high ASCII characters ... PC corner:
I inquired yesterday if I was perhaps using a slur when saying "aussie," and I
am told that it's more a term of endearment than anything (except by sCary, who found it
offensive, hehe) ...

Saturday, October 25, 1997

Ritual's New Engine
There is a short
article on GameSpot talking a bit about Ritual's next generation engine, Thanks Billy
"Wombat" Wilson (Voodoo Extreme).
The new engine, according to Ritual Programmer Mark Dochtermann, will be a departure:

"we're taking a right turn from what Quake
does."

No word yet on any intents on obtaining patents

Q2Test Items
This is the first I've seen of this, Brent Phillips
points out that in the Quake II Demo:

"...if you use the cheat code "give
all" and then cycle through your inventory with the "[" and "]"
keys, you can see many of the items that have not yet been implemented in the demo. But,
some of them are just "?'s". No problem. Just press the "'" (quotes)
key and you throw them down. Then walk over and pick it up and you will be told what it
is! Some of the graphics on these items are not finished. There are some interesting items
such as the Air Strike Marker, Commander's Heart, etc."

I tried this, and it does work, you can spit out these items and see their names. I
then used the quotes trick to fill a room with Rocket Launchers: now that's my idea of a
deathmatch level.

PingTool
No, not a new derisive nickname for an LPB ("I'd kill you on a LAN, PingTool"),
PingTool is described as a no nonsense QuakeWorld server browser for Win95 / NT 4.0 that
has some handy features. Version 1.0 has been released on the PingTool page.

Kill Bill?
Sgt.CoolGuy has posted his new TeamFortress map on his page, Sgt.CoolGuy's Detail Duty, which is a variation
on the TF assassinate the President scenario. The objective here for the assassins (team
3) is to kill Bill Gates at a keynote speech. Team 1 is Bill himself, Team 2 are Bill's
bodyguards, and team 4 are the Convention Geeks.

Obsidian Heaven

TeamGameSpy member and 3Dfx portsmith, Jack "morbid" Mathews, updated
his .plan with details on how you can win one of the two 3Dfx Obsidian boards he's
bringing to The FRAG by dressing like a video card,
or something.

id Programmer Brian Hook made a few .plan updates, one of which lead to
a bit of a confrontation (we'll get to that). One
update with some options owners of certain GL video cards (e.g., NVidia
RIVA128) can do to brighten up Q2Test, another
.plan update for those with crappy output with OpenGL under WinNT using an MCD driver
(ATI Rage Pro, NVidia RIVA128, and a couple others) to make that Service Pack 3 is
installed. Then, his next addition referring to competitors games getting loads of
coverage before shipping, inspired an
angry .plan file response from 3D Realm's George Broussard, which
inspired a bit of a clarification
in Brian's followup.

Competitions

There was an international QuakeWorld match between Australia and Japan yesterday, with
the Aussies (that's not an offensive phrase, is it?) coming out on top 378-316. Details
are on the Australian Special Forces page.

Articles: Yes, an articles section. I will look
to organize any past articles here, and add new ones in the future. To kick the shebang
off in the meantime, as the controller wars rage in the mailbag, resident controller
tester loonyboi has followed up on the Assassin 3D review he did this summer with a review of the ubiquitous SpaceOrb
360.

The MailBag: Hehe, an offer from Joystick
advocate Andrew R. Southwick to go to war with the keyboarders.

Help Wanted: Always updated. Spotlight today
on Eidos Interactive, where sxegRRl is looking for
female programmers, artists, animators, and level designers for a new development team she
is putting together. Contact her for more details.

etc.If you're experiencing the choppy sound
problem in Q2Test and are using a SoundBlaster, check out the new drivers
released the other day on the Creative Labs site. I
formerly had to set full-screen "off" to avoid sound lag, and now the sound is
right either way. Thanks Jeffrey A. Reitman
for pointing that out ... The Quake House
of Resourses is devoted to being a resource for users of
the Virtus Deathmatch Maker level editor ... Lean and mean: the main news
page starts to get clunky late in the week, so I'm going to start keeping only a couple of days worth of news on the front page.
Anything you've missed, as always, can be found in the News
Archive ... Image of the Day is another
Easter Egg from the Quake II Test. I'm still not sure if the last was real, but this one
is quite based in reality: A screenshot (13 KB) taken
with the FoV set to 110 (which displays more of the weapon model), showing the initials of
id's gunsmith Paul Steed near the non-business end of the grenade launcher. Thanks Thermo ...